b'3-Minute Journal'http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/b''en-usWed, 28 Jan 2015 01:22:05 +0000Atlantic Magazine - &quot;The Value of Remembering Ordinary Moments&quot;http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/atlantic-magazine-the-value-of-remembering-ordinary-moments/<p>There's a new article on the Atlantic magazine: "<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/the-value-of-remembering-ordinary-moments/384510/">The Value of Remembering Ordinary Moments</a>" by Cody Delistraty. If you are interested in journaling, you should read the whole thing. The article describes research from Ting Zhang of Harvard University, in which she discovered that students' interest in reviewing events of their lives increased as time passed after documenting them. And of the moments, ordinary ones were more interesting than significant ones. </p>
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<p><em>The people in the study were most interested in rediscovering the mundane experiences. Asked to write down what they were doing on an ordinary day (a few days before Valentine’s Day) and then on an extraordinary day (on Valentine’s Day), participants had more pleasure reading their entry about the ordinary day three months later than their entry about the extraordinary day. The ordinary experience had also been more difficult to remember than the extraordinary one and so its rediscovery felt fresher.</em></p>
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<p>What was more interesting was that the subjects tended not to want to spend time, even a few minutes, documenting those events. Yet their regret over not writing them down was significant:</p>
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<p><em>Given a choice between writing about their day for five minutes or watching a talk show host interview an author for an equal amount of time, only 27 percent of people chose to document their day and only 28 percent of people—regardless of whether they chose to write or not—thought that they would care later about what they were doing that day. Three months later, 58 percent of people said they regretted choosing the talk show clip over journaling. They were bad at estimating how much they’d value the present once it became the past.</em></p>
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<p>So, journaling is good for you; research says so!</p>John CWed, 28 Jan 2015 01:22:05 +0000http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/atlantic-magazine-the-value-of-remembering-ordinary-moments/A journaling exercise from &quot;Leading the Life You Want&quot;http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/a-journaling-exercise-from-leading-the-life-you-want/<p><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HPFT2C90oJg/VBGqZAzZ5gI/AAAAAAAADqw/K-1h1YRsOO4/s320/download.jpeg" height="172" width="160"></p>
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<p><em>We're finishing off our series on the new book "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1422189414/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1422189414&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=shotalinnmara-20&amp;linkId=QHPR2UPT4SREBFJ2">Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life</a>," by Stewart Friedman of the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School. This is a brief journaling exercise he lays out. Give it a try!</em></p>
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<p>Just as a scientist keeps a roster of ideas for experiments, try keeping a journal or log for a few days. Record any hypotheses that occur to you for new ways of getting things done, especially if they would benefit different parts of your life and help you design the kind of life you want to lead in the future. Think of these as experiments; you are a scientist, with your life as your laboratory. Don't judge your ideas. Use this opportunity to come up with options for things you might do differently.</p>
<p>Now choose one such idea to implement. It could involve a new activity, such as getting feedback from end users of a prototye you're developing . It couls also mean stopping or reducing something you're already doing, such as checking your social media accounts fifteen times a day. What assumptions about the way things are now would you have to challenge in order to move forward on these actions? Who could you talk to about your thinking? Who can help you understand your assumptions and implement the idea successfully? Perhaps you're anxious about getting feedback on that prototype. You decide to talk it over with a friend. He persuades you to see that your fear of discovering that it's all a big waste of time is misguided and that any critique of your model will give you what you need to improve it.</p>
<p>...As studies on the theory of "small wins" have shown, thinking about our assumptions and then designing incremental steps to create change can give us greater confidence to question the status quo.</p>
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<p><em>My suggestion would be not only to use journaling to identify your ideas at the outset of this exercise; but continue to use journaling to record your progress, identify setbacks, and keep track of realizations you have along the way.</em></p>John CTue, 23 Sep 2014 04:00:00 +0000http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/a-journaling-exercise-from-leading-the-life-you-want/More on journaling in &quot;Leading the Life You Want&quot;http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/more-on-journaling-in-leading-the-life-you-want/<p><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HPFT2C90oJg/VBGqZAzZ5gI/AAAAAAAADqw/K-1h1YRsOO4/s320/download.jpeg" height="172" width="160"></p>
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<p><em>Another excerpt from the new book "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1422189414/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1422189414&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=shotalinnmara-20&amp;linkId=QHPR2UPT4SREBFJ2">Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life</a>," by Stewart Friedman of the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School. This shows how Tom Tierney (whose story was begun in our prior post) used his journal to help incubate his idea for the nonprofit company Bridgespan, which he eventually cofounded.</em></p>
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<p>In a [journal entry] from 1988, for instance, Tierney - who was then running the San Francisco office of Bain &amp; Company - wrote about what he called a "Make a Difference Company." The idea percolated in Tierney's mind and <em>kept surfacing in his journal</em> [emphasis mine] until 1999, when Bridgespan was born.</p>
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<p><em>If you journal regularly, Ideas, plans, concepts that are important to you will continue to pop up in your entries. A yearly review can unearth these patterns and keep ideas alive until the time is right to pursue them - in Tierney's case, this was more than 10 years.</em></p>John CTue, 16 Sep 2014 04:00:00 +0000http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/more-on-journaling-in-leading-the-life-you-want/A real-life example of journaling and reflectionhttp://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/a-real-life-example-of-journaling-and-reflection/<p><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HPFT2C90oJg/VBGqZAzZ5gI/AAAAAAAADqw/K-1h1YRsOO4/s320/download.jpeg" height="172" width="160"></p>
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<p>This is an excerpt from the new book "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1422189414/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1422189414&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=shotalinnmara-20&amp;linkId=QHPR2UPT4SREBFJ2">Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life</a>," by Stewart Friedman of the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School. It's a very useful example of how one person has created a life habit of journaling - and of reviewing the journal regularly to assess progress and plan for the future. </p>
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<p>It's still dark outside when Tom Tierney rises in his home outside Boston on a December morning. He dresses quietly, so as not to wake his wife, Karen, and goes to the kitchen to brew some coffee. At fifty-nine, Tierney is trim and retains a certain boyishness, helped by the rimless glasses, a full head of hair, and boundless energy. He carries a mug and the fresh pot into his office and closes the door. It's 5:15 a.m., and time to begin the ritual of writing what he calls his "annual review."</p>
<p>The term reflects Tierney's lifetime in business: the Harvard MBA, two decades at the consulting firm Bain &amp; Cimpany (including eight years as chief executive), and fourteen years as cofounder and guiding spirit of the nonprofit Bridgespan. But he doesn't write this personal document with the notion that it should be legible for anybody else. "It's just for me," he told me in a long interview a few years ago. "I ask how I spent my time. And I ask how I'm doing. And then I ask, 'Where am I going with all this? How can I be better? What are my priorities for the next year? Five years? Ten years?'" The annual review is more than a career assessment; it might include personal goals or thoughts about how his two sons are doing. The ritual reflects the qualities that Tierney is known for: discipline, self-reflection, an ability to think big and creatively, and a dedication to personal development, his own and others'.</p>
<p>As he works, he goes back through journal entries that he's written on cross-country flights and in other spare moments. Tierney, who has been journaling for decades, believes the practice helps him record meaningful data. "I keep track of every single travel day, of every day that I'm home after seven, and of how many nights I'm away and what's causing that." But it also helps him think through bigger life questions, track his progress toward long-term goals, and capture ideas and dreams about what might be.</p>John CThu, 11 Sep 2014 14:01:14 +0000http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/a-real-life-example-of-journaling-and-reflection/How to do a Weekly Reflectionhttp://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/how-to-do-a-weekly-reflection/<p>For the past several weeks, we've been reminding you at the end of the week to do a Weekly Reflection based on your journal. Here is a simple approach for a regular reflection that you can use. Feel free to alter this as you see fit, and consider sharing your own approach with us as a comment to this post.</p>
<ol>
<li><span style="">Go to the <a href="http://www.3minutejournal.com/event/" target="_blank">View Events</a> page. Read through the entries for the past week. If any of them don't trigger any memories, spend a few moments trying to recall the actual event.</span></li>
<li><span style="">What was the week's high point? </span></li>
<li><span style="">If any events were "rare" or "never happened before," take a look at those. Those can be your <a href="http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/finding-your-stories-at-the-edge-of-experience/" target="_blank">stories on the edge of experience</a>, the ones you'll remember for a while.</span></li>
<li><span style="">What will you take away from the week? What worked well that you'll continue, or what do you want to stop doing?</span></li>
<li><span style="">Make a few notes (use a <a href="http://www.3minutejournal.com/event_add/" target="_blank">journal entry</a> if you'd like) for next week.</span></li>
</ol>John CWed, 02 Jul 2014 13:32:30 +0000http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/how-to-do-a-weekly-reflection/&quot;Appifying&quot; 3MJ for your Android phonehttp://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/appifying-3mj-for-your-android-phone/<p><span>We've had many requests to provide a mobile app version of 3mj. And it's in our plans to do. In the meantime, i</span><span>f you have an Android phone, v4.0 or later, you can "appify" 3Minute Journal by doing this:</span></p>
<p><span><br>1) Open your phone's browser and go to <a href="http://3minutejournal.com/" target="_blank">http://3minutejournal.com</a>.<br><br>2) On the far right of the address bar at the top of the page, tap the 3 dots. Press "Save to bookmarks" on the menu that is displayed. Press "OK" after "Bookmark this page" is displayed. <br><br>3) Go to the far right of the address bar and tap the 3 dots again. Tap "Bookmarks."<br><br>4) Press and hold the icon corresponding to the 3Minute Journal bookmark you just created. On the menu that pops up, tap "Add shortcut to home"<br><br>5) Your phone will place the bookmark on an open space in your home screen (you may need to swipe to find the screen if you have a lot of apps on your home screen). <br><br>6) Tapping that icon on your home screen will bring up 3MJ, as if it were an app. </span></p>
<p><span>7) There's one more step that can complete the appification process - setting a daily reminder. Go to Google Now. In search box, type, "Set reminder for each weekday at [pick your preferred time] to fill in 3mj entry." You will get a reminder setup screen set up with "Fill in 3mj" in the reminder text or something similar with your preferred time and each weekday. Tap in the top box, add "http://3mj.me/entry_add" - which will add a hyperlink to the reminder text. Finally, click "Remind me at this time" which will set the reminder. Your Android phone will now automatically remind you to do your entry - on your schedule. When the reminder goes off, touch the URL (which will be highlighted) to go to the Add Entry screen. Voila - a pseudo-app!<br><br>[If you have an iPhone and figure out a similar process, please share it with us and we'll include it in a future post.]</span></p>John CFri, 13 Jun 2014 12:09:42 +0000http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/appifying-3mj-for-your-android-phone/Finding your &quot;stories at the edge of experience&quot;http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/finding-your-stories-at-the-edge-of-experience/<p>One way to think about journal entries is that they are small stories encapsulating what was most significant about the day they were written about. As you build your repository of entries, you'll find that many are run-of-the-mill, not particularly significant, and that a few, maybe more than a few, are really important. What is different about these?</p>
<p>Cynthia Kurtz is a researcher who works with groups to help them gather and make sense of stories to learn about themselves and solve problems. Her book, "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0991369408/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0991369408&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=shotalinnmara-20">Working With Stories</a>," has just been released.</p>
<p>Cynthia knows everything about stories but in particular she has a gift for understanding what makes individual stories meaningful and long-lasting. She writes about this eloquently in her book:</p>
<p><em>As people tell stories (to themselves and others), they explore the areas of their worlds that hold the most opportunity and danger: the edges of experience.</em></p>
<p><em>Why pay so much attention to the edges? Because telling stories takes time and energy, and only at the edges is it worth the expense. Exploring the well-known simply does not pay off. </em></p>
<p><em>Stories about rules are valuable, yes, but a modicum of those will suffice. Stories about </em>exceptions<em> to the rules are more valuable, and the more the better because every exception is different.... This is why folk tale collections are made not of people sowing wheat and baking bread but of babies who drink oceans and tumble-down huts full of gold.</em></p>
<p>This relates to your journal in this way; there are two questions that help indicate the stories at the edges of <em>your</em> experience - the remembering question and the frequency question.* An experience that has happened rarely, or has never happened before, especially one that you will remember for "a long time" or "a lifetime" are those stories at the edge of your experience. They are the ones you will tell your friends &amp; children years from now.</p>
<p>To find these stories, go to the <a href="http://www.3minutejournal.com/event/?sort=-memory_length">View Events</a> page and sort on "Frequency" and "Remembering."</p>
<p>*It's no accident that these questions are part of the journal entry. When we were discussing this project with Cynthia several years ago, she suggested them.</p>John CWed, 11 Jun 2014 12:46:42 +0000http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/finding-your-stories-at-the-edge-of-experience/An example visualizationhttp://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/an-example-visualization/<p>With the new release, you can now export your journal entries to a tab-delimited file, which now opens up all sorts of visualization possibilities. Here are a couple of charts I created by massaging an Excel spreadsheet a bit and importing it into a free tool called MicroStrategy Visual Insight (there are many many such tools out there):</p>
<p><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7Rri2-PPfVg/U36OR11YVmI/AAAAAAAAC5s/MwUc5Isw9u8/s1600/2013+visualization.png"></p>
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<p>This is what's called a Heat Map. This is showing my entries from 2013. The "A" section is for accomplishments, the "S" section for setbacks. Note that setbacks are uniformly connected with negative emotions. The areas of the rectangles represent frequency of those emotions. </p>
<p>What does this tell me? That my ratio of accomplishments to setbacks is healthy, that "encouraged" and "discouraged" are my two most prominent emotions on the positive and negative side, respecitively.</p>
<p>There are many possible visualizations, and selecting some of these to build into the platform is one of the goals of our next release. In the meantime, export your data and try it out for yourself!</p>John CFri, 23 May 2014 00:04:50 +0000http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/an-example-visualization/New release is live! Data Export, Date Formats, and Account Deletionhttp://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/new-release-is-live-data-export-date-formats-and-account-deletion/<p>Our first new release is out as of tonight. This release addresses some of the items that were brought up in your feedback.</p>
<ul>
<li><span style="">Under <a href="http://www.3minutejournal.com/preferences/">Preferences</a> (click the arrow next to your username to access this menu), you can now specify a date format and your location. The location is used to establish your timezone, so that default dates will reflect the current time at your location. </span></li>
<li><span style="">You can now <a href="http://www.3minutejournal.com/export/">export your data</a> (from the same menu where you can select Preferences). The data will be tab-delimited.</span></li>
<li><span style="">And, you can delete your account. Look for this option on the Preferences menu</span></li>
</ul>
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<div>Check it out and let us know what you think!</div>
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<div>Next up will be allowing customization of the timing of daily reminders. Stay tuned for that.</div>John CSun, 18 May 2014 02:53:15 +0000http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/new-release-is-live-data-export-date-formats-and-account-deletion/Feeling grateful can increase your patiencehttp://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/feeling-grateful-can-increase-your-patience/<p>From "<a href="http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/04/gratitude-is-the-new-willpower/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HBR.org%29&amp;utm_content=Netvibes">Gratitude Is The New Willpower</a>," by David DeSteno, from HBR Blog Network.</p>
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<blockquote>
<p>We designed an experiment (now <a href="https://static.squarespace.com/static/52853b8ae4b0a6c35d3f8e9d/t/531f8140e4b03eb27337b156/1394573632883/gratitude-a-tool-for-reducing-economic-impatience.pdf">in press </a>at the journal Psychological Science) that presented participants with a set of 27 questions, which pit a desire for immediate cash against a willingness to wait for larger rewards at various times in the future. For example, one question required study subjects to choose between receiving $54 now or $80 in 30 days. To increase the stakes, participants knew they had a chance to obtain one of the financial rewards they had selected; it wasn’t purely hypothetical. If they chose the immediate cash, they’d be paid then and there; if they chose the delayed amount, we’d send them a check. However, before they made these decisions, we randomly assigned each one of them to recall and briefly write about an event from their past that made them feel (a) grateful, (b) happy, or (c) neutral.</p>
<p>As we expected, individuals who wrote about neutral or happy times had a strong preference for immediate payouts. But those who’d described feeling grateful showed significantly more patience. They required an immediate $63, on average, to forgo receiving $85 in three months, whereas the neutral and happy groups required only $55, on average, to forgo the same future gain. Even more telling was the fact that any given participant’s degree of patience was directly related to the amount of gratitude he or she reported feeling. It’s important to note that positive feelings alone were not enough to enhance patience: Happy participants were just as impatient as those in the neutral condition. The influence of gratitude was quite specific.</p>
<p>We see broad implications for these findings, since they suggest that gratitude can foster long-term thinking. We all recognize the fact that willpower can and does fail at times. Having an alternative source of patience – one that can come from something as simple as reflecting on an emotional memory – offers an important new tool for long-term success. And that itself is something to be grateful for.</p>
</blockquote>John CTue, 22 Apr 2014 14:58:17 +0000http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/feeling-grateful-can-increase-your-patience/You don&#39;t have time for reflection, but maybe you should make timehttp://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/you-dont-have-time-for-reflection-but-maybe-you-should-make-time/<p>More juiciness from the <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2414478">recent Harvard working paper</a> we referred to last week:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Though some organizations are increasingly relying on some group reflection (e.g., “after-action reports”), there has been almost no effort to encourage individuals to reflect, and people often fail to engage in self-reflection themselves. Though reflection entails the high opportunity cost of one’s time, we argue and show that reflecting after completing tasks is no idle pursuit: it can powerfully enhance the learning process. Learning, we find, can be augmented if one deliberately focuses on thinking about what one has been doing. [Our research shows] a significant performance differential when comparing learning-by-doing alone to learning-by-doing coupled with reflection....</em></p>
</blockquote>John CTue, 15 Apr 2014 19:42:04 +0000http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/you-dont-have-time-for-reflection-but-maybe-you-should-make-time/OpenSSL vulnerability addressedhttp://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/openssl-vulnerability-addressed/<p>You may have read about the recently-discovered vulnerability with OpenSSL (<a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/08/flaw-found-in-key-method-for-protecting-data-on-the-internet/?ref=technology" target="_blank">here's an article about it</a>). Like many other sites, 3MJ uses OpenSSL for encryption and was affected by this vulnerability. Our systems were patched yesterday and are no longer vulnerable to this exploit. To ensure the security of your account, we recommend <a href="https://www.3minutejournal.com/accounts/update/" target="_blank">changing your password</a><span style=""> </span>and logging out of any current sessions.</p>John CWed, 09 Apr 2014 14:12:39 +0000http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/openssl-vulnerability-addressed/Harvard working paper asserts that reflection is crucial to self-improvementhttp://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/harvard-working-paper-asserts-that-reflection-is-crucial-to-self-improvement/<p>A new working paper (<a href="http://ssrn.com/abstract=2414478">link</a>) co-authored by Francesca Gino, Gary Pisano and Bradley Staats of Harvard Business School (the lead author is Giada diStefano of HEC) talks about a subject very important to this site - the role of reflection in learning and self-improvement. This is from the abstract: </p>
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<p><em>We propose that one of the critical components of learning is reflection, or the intentional attempt to synthesize, abstract, and articulate the key lessons taught by experience. Drawing on dual-process theory, we focus on the reflective dimension of the learning process and propose that learning can be augmented by deliberately focusing on thinking about what one has been doing. We test the resulting dual-process learning model experimentally, using a mixed-method design that combines two laboratory experiments with a field experiment conducted in a large business process outsourcing company in India. We find a performance differential when comparing learning-by-doing alone to learning-by-doing coupled with reflection. </em></p>
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<p>The results, tested both in a lab simulation and a real-world field experiment, are striking:</p>
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<p><em>By being allocated to the reflection condition [as opposed to training without reflecction], participants improved their score on the final assessment test of 15.1 points – that is, a 22.8% increase with respect to the average score for the entire sample (66.1). Analogously, by being allocated to the sharing condition [sharing experience with others as well as self-reflection], participants improved their score on the final assessment test of 16.5 points – that is, a 25.0% increase with respect to the average score for the entire sample.</em></p>
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<p>This says something very important, and probably not surprising if you are using 3Minute Journal. Reflecting on your work improves learning and performance - significantly. Isn't that worth a few minutes a day?</p>John CTue, 08 Apr 2014 18:28:16 +0000http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/harvard-working-paper-asserts-that-reflection-is-crucial-to-self-improvement/Reflect Quarterly - a how-to guidehttp://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/reflect-quarterly-a-how-to-guide/<p>Hopefully you've been making journal entries for a while now, and since it's the end of the first quarter of the year, let's discuss how a quarterly reflection might work. There are many ways to do this; I am sharing my approach, but you should do whatever works for you. It's all good.</p>
<p>The first step is to go to the View Events tab. Ensure the list is sorted from most recent date to earliest. (There will be an upside-down delta symbol by the Date heading.) Then sort by Category and page down to where Accomplishments are listed. We'll start there.</p>
<ul>
<li>How many accomplishments are there for the quarter?</li>
<li>Which ones are big accomplishments and which are small?</li>
<li>Can you see where small accomplishments led up to a big milestone (delivery of a product, a completed sale, etc.)?</li>
<li>Can you see any patterns - which accomplishments made you happiest? Which were less exciting?</li>
<li>How would you sum up your accomplishments this quarter in one sentence?</li>
</ul>
<p>The look at Mistakes (they are displayed above Accomplishments alphabetically).</p>
<ul>
<li>Any patterns you see?</li>
<li>What actions can you take so that these particular mistakes don't happen again?</li>
</ul>
<p>Finally, look at Grateful Fors:</p>
<ul>
<li>How does this list make you feel?</li>
</ul>
<p>Then, resort the list by Date, and then sort by Frequency. Look at the Rare and Never Happened Before events. These can sometimes have significance or show the development of a new pattern. Or they could be one-time-only events. You decide. </p>
<p>Now close your eyes and replay the quarter in your mind - recall those events that were meaningful Accomplishments, notable Mistakes, and Grateful Fors. How do you feel about things overall. Are you making progress?</p>
<p>Happy journaling!</p>John CMon, 31 Mar 2014 04:00:00 +0000http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/reflect-quarterly-a-how-to-guide/Product evolution planshttp://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/product-evolution-plans/<p>Many thanks to everyone who has filled in the user survey. We've read and discussed every one and want to share our near-term product plans. These are all items that were suggested by more than one respondent, and also lined up with our vision for the site.<br><br>Short-term: we're going to take care of some basics that are making the site harder to use than it should be. These include - the ability to enter your home time zone so that default entry dates are customized to your home time, the ability to set a preferred hour for the daily reminder email, and ability to export your entries to a .csv file. <br><br>Medium-term: we're going to add some more visualizations for the Lab based on your suggestions and some ideas we've been playing with. <br><br>Longer-term: there is much demand for iOS, Windows Phone and Android apps. We hear you. Creating an app is a significant undertaking, and we are a small team. We will get there, so we ask for your patience. Stay tuned for more on this.</p>John CThu, 27 Mar 2014 15:05:21 +0000http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/product-evolution-plans/Tips volume 1 (November-December 2013) http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/tips-volume-1-november-december-2013/<div>Here's a compendium of the tips we sent out in our Daily Reminder emails in November and December of 2013. </div>
<p></p>
<ul>
<li>Find self-analytics tables and charts on the <a href="http://www.3minutejournal.com/lab/">Lab</a> page. </li>
<li>Currently the app displays dates in US format (mm/dd/yyyy). The default is today's date. If you click in the date box, you will be presented with a calendar to select a different date if you'd like. </li>
<li>Mobile... we don't have an iPhone or Android app, but it's easy to access your journal just as if it were one. First, bookmark <a href="http://3mj.me/">the site</a>, then add the bookmark to a free spot on your home screen. Next time you go to journal, just tap the icon and you'll go right to the front page. If you'd prefer, you can bookmark the <a href="http://www.3minutejournal.com/event_add/">Add Event</a> page to go right there when you tap. </li>
<li>"Accomplishment Ratio" on the Lab tab trends accomplishments divided by (accomplishments+setbacks), as a percentage. If this ratio falls below 75% for any prolonged period, it likely signals that you are not satisfied with your inner work life. The idea that work progress is a crucial indicator of job satisfaction was first expressed in <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0054KBLBI/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B0054KBLBI&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=shotalinnmara-20">The Progress Principle</a>, </i>which has much more to say about this. </li>
<li>Promising yourself to journal regularly (or daily) is a great New Year's resolution.</li>
<li>Find self-analytics tables and charts on the <a href="http://www.3minutejournal.com/lab/">Lab</a> page. </li>
<li>If you find a certain time of day convenient to journal, establish a recurring appointment that will automatically remind you. I set a 5-minute time at 4:30 every weekday, and skip the weekend. Do what works for you!</li>
<li>I use the "MIstakes" classifier to log situations that didn't go the way I expected them to. I may not have caused them to go wrong, but they veered away from my plan. I like to look at these on a quarterly basis to see if there are any patterns that I should make changes to address. </li>
<li><i>Mobile usage.</i> You can use 3Minute Journal on your phone or tablet. Just open your browser and go to <span color="#1155cc" size="2"><a href="http://3minutejournal.com/" target="_blank">http://3minutejournal.com</a></span> or <span color="#1155cc" size="2"><a href="http://3mj.me/" target="_blank">http://3mj.me</a></span> (our short URL). Log in as normal and you'll have your journal right there with you! </li>
<li><i>Journaling Gratitude.</i> Some research has shown that being grateful for can increase overall happiness. If something happened today that makes you appreciate someone or something, answer the "This event describes" question as "Grateful for."</li>
<li><i>"How Long" question.</i> It can help to make your own internal time scale for this question. For me, "a while" is months to a year or more. "A long time" is several years, and "Not very long" is measured in weeks. What's your scale?</li>
<li><i>Something significant happens after you journal.</i> From time to time, you will finish your journal entry, and then something important happens. I take one of two approaches when this happens. Sometimes, I do a second journal entry that day; or I treat it as part of tomorrow, and think of it as part of the things I did the next day.</li>
<li><i>Daily reminders.</i> If the reminder comes up before you're ready to journal and you use Gmail, marking it "unread" will keep it near the top of your inbox. </li>
<li>If you miss a day of journaling, just write two entries the following day. </li>
<li>If you are journaling your work life, review your calendar, notes, etc., to recall what you did that day. Then pick out the one event that sticks out the most to you and write about that.</li>
<li>Mindfulness can be a difficult concept to grasp right away. There's a very straightforward podcast on the subject at the Harvard Business Review website. Check it out <a href="http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/11/reduce-stress-with-mindfulness/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HBR.org%29&amp;utm_content=Netvibes">here</a>. </li>
<li>Did you know you can access your journal using the short URL <a href="http://3mj.me/">http://3mj.me</a>?</li>
<li>Access the analytics page from the "Lab" menu. "Good Days Index" measures the percentage of entries marked with positive emotions compared to all entries.</li>
</ul>John CWed, 19 Feb 2014 22:19:05 +0000http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/tips-volume-1-november-december-2013/Looking for a New Year&#39;s Resolution? Start a journaling habithttp://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/looking-for-a-new-years-resolution-start-a-journaling-habit/<p>Starting a new habit is as traditional part of a New Year's celebration as <a href="http://www.southernliving.com/food/holidays-occasions/new-years-recipes-traditions-00417000070440/">eating black-eyed peas</a>. This year, consider starting a journal. It's a great way to mark accomplishments and things you're grateful for (or things you would rather avoid in the future).</p>
<p>Use paper, a word doc, or my favorite - the <a href="http://3mj.me">3Minute Journal app</a>. Plan to set aside a couple of minutes at the end of each weekday (or evey day) to write down the most significant event that happened and answer a few questions about it. Within a month or so, you'll have a rich repository of data about yourself that you can use to track your inner work life.</p>
<p>Ask a friend to try it with you!</p>John CMon, 30 Dec 2013 11:00:00 +0000http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/looking-for-a-new-years-resolution-start-a-journaling-habit/Harvard Business School prof Francesca Gino on the benefits of gratitudehttp://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/harvard-business-school-prof-francesca-gino-on-the-benefits-of-gratitude/<p><a href="http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=271812">Francesca Gino</a> studies negotiation and decisionmaking at Harvard Business School. But in her <a href="http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/11/be-grateful-more-often/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HBR.org%29&amp;utm_content=Netvibes">recent post for the HBR Blog Network</a>, she takes up the benefits of showing gratitude. It's a terrific post, and here's a taste:</p>
<p><em>Failing to express gratitude when we can is a missed opportunity for at least two reasons. First, feeling grateful has several beneficial effects on us: gratitude enables us to savor positive experiences, cope with stressful circumstances and be resilient in the face of challenges, and strengthen our social relationships. Psychological research [<a href="http://sonjalyubomirsky.com/wp-content/themes/sonjalyubomirsky/papers/LSS2005.pdf">PDF</a>] has shown that writing letters of gratitude once a week over a six-week period leads to greater life satisfaction as compared to simply recording ordinary life events.</em></p>
<p>3Minute Journal is a place to put your reflections of gratitude, to remind yourself of them and keep them available to look at in the future, perhaps when things aren't going so well. Access your journal <a href="http://3mj.me">here</a>. </p>John CTue, 26 Nov 2013 13:58:43 +0000http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/harvard-business-school-prof-francesca-gino-on-the-benefits-of-gratitude/4 Benefits From Journaling Your Work Lifehttp://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/4-benefits-from-journaling-your-work-life/<p>For the past two years, I’ve kept a daily journal of my work life. The purpose was to see if capturing stories and related statistics could help me be more productive and effective at work. It has done that and a lot more.</p>
<p>Let me say first that in journaling, the medium matters. Paper diaries have been used for centuries and some, such as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004TPAS5O/ref=as_li_ss_tl" target="_blank">The Diary of Samuel Pepys</a> or Jim Carroll’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140100180/ref=as_li_ss_tl" target="_blank">The Basketball Diaries</a>, have become works of literature in their own right.</p>
<p>Handwritten paper journals, though, are better as places to unload thoughts than as tools for reflection. They can’t be readily searched, except by date, and can’t be analyzed in any meaningful way, such as to answer the question, “How many times did I write about travel in the past year?”</p>
<p>I use an <a href="http://www.3minutejournal.com/" target="_blank">online journal</a>, which allows me to search and sort every entry, and in addition to track and trend the emotions and thoughts that accompany the journal entries. It’s been a revelation to me. Here are some concrete benefits I’ve found that journaling can offer you:</p>
<p><strong>1. Marking progress</strong> – Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, in their book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0054KBLBI/ref=as_li_ss_tl" target="_blank">The Progress Principle</a>, assert that continual, daily progress is the most important attribute in what they call a fulfilled “inner work life.” Often we think we a are spinning our wheels, when we may in fact be accomplishing many things, but simply losing track of them. Daily journaling provides the data to show you that significant progress accrues from many small steps.</p>
<p><strong>2. Understanding strengths and “likes”</strong> – one (best-selling) <a href="http://www.strengthsfinder.com/home.aspx" target="_blank">body of thought</a> encourages us to find our strengths. Others tell us to <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/follow-your-passion" target="_blank">follow our passion</a>. Recording and marking your daily activities based on whether they were successful and how much you like them can give you the data you need to paint an accurate picture of your strengths and identify the tasks that arouse your passions.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.legalproductivity.com/practice-management/a-post-mortem-even-if-you-win/" target="_blank">More from John Caddell: A Post Mortem, Even If You Win</a></p>
<p><strong>3. Finding and fixing weaknesses</strong> – making a mistake does not have to be a career-defining event, but making the same mistake over and over is a recipe for trouble. Your journal can help you find patterns in mistake-making that you can fix before that happens.</p>
<p><strong>4. Showing gratitude</strong> – Some studies have shown that feeling and expressing gratitude can<a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886908000767" target="_blank">improve personal satisfaction with life</a>. A daily journal is a handy place to record these important moments of gratefulness.</p>
<p>Google’s Chade-Meng Tan, author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0070XF474/ref=as_li_ss_tl" target="_blank">Search Inside Yourself</a>, wrote “The type of deep self-knowledge and blatant self-honesty needed for sustainable self-confidence means having nothing to hide from oneself. It comes from accurate self-assessment. If we can assess ourselves accurately, we can clearly and objectively see our greatest strengths and our biggest weaknesses…. We learn about our deepest priorities in life, what is important to us, and what is not important that we can let go.”</p>John CThu, 21 Nov 2013 15:04:00 +0000http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/4-benefits-from-journaling-your-work-life/Tips For Developing A New Habithttp://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/tips-for-developing-a-new-habit/<p>When you find a pattern of mistakes, disrupting that pattern often involves making a new, more productive habit. For example, when I ran into trouble keeping all my tasks and meetings straight, I adopted the Getting Things Done method. It took a number of weeks till the method was ingrained in my daily routine. Building a new habit isn't easy - we can slip up even if we know the habit is in our best interests. That's because building a habit - i.e., making something automatic - requires a lot of cognitive energy, something our brain actively tries to conserve. But it can be done. These tips came from <a href="http://www.penguinusablog.com/five-ways-to-make-a-new-habit-stick-by-kelly-mcgonigal-ph-d-the-willpower-instinct-penguin-random-house-open-house/">a post on the Penguin Books blog by author Kelly McGonigal</a>. She is the author of The Willpower Instinct. For more explanation, see <a href="http://www.penguinusablog.com/five-ways-to-make-a-new-habit-stick-by-kelly-mcgonigal-ph-d-the-willpower-instinct-penguin-random-house-open-house/">the original post</a>.</p>
<ol>
<li>Choose a tiny habit - changing one small thing at a time is easier than trying to make a huge change all at once. </li>
<li>"I will" power is stronger than "I won't" - focus on positive changes rather than negative ones.</li>
<li>Find your "want" power - reminding yourself why you are making this change will help you maintain your enthusiasm.</li>
<li>Expect resistance - part of you will question what you are doing; use that as fuel to continue, not as a reason to stop</li>
<li>Forgive your mistakes - you won't be perfect, and beating yourself up will only make it easier to give up on what you are trying to do.</li>
</ol>
<div>Remember that the journaling habit will also take time. Think of these lessons, and they may help.</div>John CThu, 14 Nov 2013 11:00:00 +0000http://www.3minutejournal.com/blog/tips-for-developing-a-new-habit/